Each student will complete four projects this semester. The first
three projects are low-stakes projects designed to help you learn your
way around the practical and the theoretical sides of hypertext
authorship. The fourth project is a large-scale collaboration that
the entire class will work on. Check back to this page as the
semester moves on to see the specific project assignments.
In the meantime, here are brief descriptions of the projects you'll
be doing:
- Project 1: Your Home Page, due 15 March
- What does it mean that everyone builds "home" pages on the web?
What purpose do these digital representations serve? Why do we ground
these pages in geography (my home) rather than our ego (my mind) or
our experiences (my biography)? Using readings and the movie
Memento, we will explore what it means to encapsulate one's
public face for the world to see.
- Project 2: Web Portal
- A common approach to web design is the "portal," a metaphor that
suggests physical passage and constraint at the same time. This
project will think about web portals in the context of "interface."
How do the interfaces we use affect our experiences of web texts?
What interfaces work (and which ones fail) for Web Portals?
- Project 3: Tactical Appropriation
- Michel de Certeau suggests that despite the one-way nature of
dominant media, we can (and do) appropriate and re-configure those
media to our own ends. Project three asks you to consider the new
media techniques of compositing, juxtaposition, and mixing to create a
"tactical appropriation" of a dominant media form.
- The CCC Hypermap
- Having already experimented with hypertext and its rhetorical
possibilities, our fourth project provides the opportunity to produce
a more public, long-lasting work than we have yet done. We will
produce a "psycho-geographic map"—a "hypermap"—of Columbia
College. This map, created collaboratively by the entire class, will
use the tactics we've explored thus far to produce an-other map of
Columbia College, which will ultimately be posted as a student
resource on the Columbia Student portal.
